With the proliferation of mobile computing devices, the opportunity exists to connect users together in a user group to provide a collaborative workspace. For example, in an educational environment, classrooms are often equipped with a presentation device, such as an interactive whiteboard (IWB) to facilitate interactive learning. As is known in the art, IWBs provide students with an opportunity to interact with the classroom material as well as learn to work together in teams.
Some IWB manufacturers also provide classroom response systems as an integrated part of their IWB products. Handheld “clickers” operating via infrared (IR) or radio frequency (RF) signals, for example, offer basic multiple choice and polling options.
By combining classroom response with an interactive whiteboard system, teachers can present material and receive feedback from students in order to direct instruction more effectively or else to carry out formal assessments. For example, a student may both solve a puzzle involving math concepts on the interactive whiteboard and later demonstrate his or her knowledge on a test delivered via the classroom response system. Some classroom response software can organize and develop activities and tests aligned with educational standards.
In addition to the basic clickers, more advanced clickers are capable of offer text and numeric responses and can export an analysis of student performance for subsequent review. Yet further, since most students have access to mobile computing devices, such as smart phones, tablets, notebook computers and the like, more sophisticated collaboration, beyond simple question and response, is possible.
However, since the mobile computing devices are not dedicated to the classroom response system, as are the clickers, determining which students and teacher belong to which class is a difficult problem that usually requires costly integration with a student information system. Often times, awkward and time consuming workarounds are required. For example, it may be required to export files from the student information system to a common format file and then import the common format file into the classroom response system. Such a process needs to be validated as errors and inconsistencies often arise during the export/import process. Alternatively, it may be required that the teachers manually enter information for each student in order to add them to the class.
It is therefore an object of the present invention at least to provide a novel collaborative workspace that facilitates quickly and easily creating a user group within a collaborative workspace.